In 1955, Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra played lovable rogues betting on romance in the lighthearted film version of the Broadway show Guys and Dolls. The stage musical, in turn, was based on the short stories of Damon Runyon, a sports journalist, author, and heavy gambler whose writing depicted the intersection of gaming and sportsmanship as full of humor and good-natured fun.
Two decades later, Robert Redford and Paul Newman teamed up in The Sting as con artists who set up a fraudulent betting parlor to rob a mob boss. Like Guys and Dolls before it (and countless films after it), the movie depicts gamblers as wisecracking thrill-seekers who sometimes win and sometimes lose, but always have a good time.
Although these movies, and popular culture in general, often depict both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, a loss at the gaming tables is usually just a plot point that sets the hero up for a giant payday and a happy ending. In this way, stories about gambling reflect the fundamental – and today, tech-reinforced – deception of gambling itself: the notion that every small loss is just another step toward an eventual big win.
The House Always Wins
Unfortunately, reality often follows a different dramatic arc. As the old saying goes, “the house always wins.” Even though an individual gambler might rake in the chips now and then, the majority of gamblers will lose, over and over again. In the aggregate, a casino can count on a steady stream of profits from its guests’ losses. That’s why the Vegas Strip is full of ostentatiously expensive buildings. Like insurance companies, casinos pay out a little bit of money to make a lot more.
What’s true for brick-and-mortar casinos is even more true for internet-based platforms. Data from betting apps shows that only 5% of users ever withdraw money. The other 95% put money in and keep playing until they lose it. While the legalization of sports betting in 30 states has played a role – researchers found a 633% increase in spending and a 400% increase in irresponsible gaming (spending more than 1% of monthly income on gambling) – the most pernicious influence has been from technology.
Today’s online sports betting (OSB) platforms combine the inherently addictive nature of gambling with sophisticated gamification and algorithmic behavior-reinforcement techniques developed by the video game and social media industries. Some professional gamblers even “game the system” by simulating addictive behaviors, like canceling withdrawals and checking their accounts in the middle of the night – actions that trigger the betting platforms to send them bonus money and other incentives to keep going.
Broadcasters, responding to sponsorship from gambling platforms, participate in this ecosystem as well, often by displaying on-screen odds associated with each game in real-time.
Chasing the Dragon
Thanks to modern technology, gambling – already a hard-to-resist, self-destructive activity – has been digitally turbocharged to maximize its exploitative grip on online users. Initially confined to the subculture of sports fans, the true toll of this industrial-strength addictiveness is now being felt in the mainstream. Young men are increasingly racking up such extreme gambling debts that they see no way out and are taking their own lives.
The data is unequivocal: gambling addicts are more likely to attempt suicide than any other kind of addict, and the rate of gambling-associated suicide in Nevada is 400% higher than in the rest of the country – a lead that we can expect the rest of the country to start closing in on, now that online platforms essentially put Vegas betting parlors in the pocket of every American.
Because gambling has historically been more attractive to men, the subsequent harms associated with gambling are also focused on the male population. However, this may be changing. Some research indicates that women with gambling problems are even more likely to commit suicide than men are.
Know When to Walk Away
In Guys & Dolls, the male characters romanced female characters who were opposed to drinking, gambling, and other vices. The tension between the free-spirited men and uptight women was played for laughs. Today, the situation is far from entertaining. While dismissing critics as self-righteous killjoys, gambling platforms and sports broadcasters are building an entire industry based on addiction and exploitation – and powering it with advanced technology that capitalizes on the weaknesses of human neural architecture.
Whether gambling should be legalized or not is a moot point. With VPN technology that makes it possible to digitally cloak your location, as long as gambling is legal anywhere, it can be abused everywhere. Stemming the rising tide of addiction and its harmful effects depends on our willingness to embrace open dialogue and individual responsibility.
Like Newman and Redford’s characters in The Sting, app developers, broadcasters, and the gaming industry have an irresistible profit motive to encourage gambling. But the targets of the contemporary gaming “sting” aren’t corrupt gangsters, they are everyday fans hoping to parlay their affinity for sports into a quick payday – a seductive prospect that all too often ends in debt, despair, or worse. Countering that well-funded machine will take more than luck. It will require all of us to speak openly with friends and family members who are susceptible – or already ensnared – by a con that may be legal, but is certainly no fun at all.